Posts tagged with Compiler

I’ve always considered software prefetching to be something of a black art. There have been times in the past when I’ve looked at my code, noticed a load is causing problems and tried inserting one or more software prefetches to alleviate the issue. Mostly this hasn’t worked, although I’ve never been sure why. In fact, even when it has worked I haven’t been totally sure why it has, usually because it’s involved a lot of trial and error in trying out different options before I hit on improved performance.

Now it turns out that most of the time I was probably trying to prefetch the wrong things. Trying to prefetch linked data structures, which are those that involve pointer chasing (like a linked list),...

One of the most important parts of our HELIX compiler is the data dependence analysis we run on the compiler’s IR to determine which instructions are independent of each other. You can read more about HELIX in general in our original CGO 2012 paper (click through my publications page to get free access to the ACM version).

HELIX’s initial data dependence pass is split into two phases, and it’s the memory alias analysis stage that is most interesting. This has the job of identifying the locations in memory that are read and written by each instruction so that we can respect all data dependences within the loops we parallelise. Since alias analysis is not precise, we need to...